


Wolfborn

by RHWildewood



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, F/M, Familiars, M/M, Magic, Multi, Siblings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-08-17 11:35:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16515656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RHWildewood/pseuds/RHWildewood
Summary: Rebecca wasn't born to Daniel Hawthorne and Elizabeth Ridgewood, but they were, in all that she knew, blood to her. Climbing in through a bedroom window of an old and imposing Hawthorne House, to find their son, James, barely a few months younger than her, they had taken her in, and given her their names. But she, in her desperate attempts to hide the secrets behind her brightly burning eyes, hadn't seen the secrets hiding in Hawthorne House. Ten years later now, she will.





	1. Hawthorne House

"You have no idea what you're talking about!" James screamed clear across the room. She felt the glass in Daniel's study tremor.

"You're out of line," The warning was clear in Daniel's tone to everyone but James.

"Where is that line?" James pushed, seventeen years of all aggression. "Huh? Is it at the beginning of Oakhurst? The border of town? Or the driveway of the house?" His words couldn't be more vicious if he tried. 

He stepped towards his father, nearly fully grown, now, he was almost his exact likeness, down to the exact shade of dark blonde hair, down to the stubborn streak.

"Watch yourself," Daniel warned like he could almost hear James's thoughts.

"Your fears are not mine," James hisses, only a step away from his father. "I won't be trapped here."

"James," Zane says, standing just behind him, calm to James's aggression, both seventeen, both terrified of what they were supposed to become.

Elizabeth closed her eyes, tired of this same song they'd been singing for nearly a month now. Like the peace that normally breezed through Hawthorne House had reached the end of its tether, that seventeen years had to be repaid in a single winter.

"Stay out of this, Zane," Their father warned, not unkindly, not dangerously, but warned all the same.

And it incensed James.

"Yeah, two voices of reason are harder to block out than just one," He spits, "Or is it that you would actually listen to him?"

And that breaks the glass. Rebecca pushes off the couch she was sitting on, forces herself in the small space between them both Daniel and James had begun to close, over a head shorter than both of them, and she turns to James.

"He taught you to reason," She whispers, low and soft, because James was her brother still. "Don't be cruel to someone that has only showed you kindness," Because Daniel had taught her to reason, too.

But James's face twists, cruel and snarling, "Sure, little sister, maybe you should speak to him, he'll listen to you," He rasps, because Zane almost heard his thoughts before he'd spoken, and wrapped his arms around James from behind, pulling him back against him.

"Enough," Zane murmurs, close to James' ear, but they're pressed so close together, they all hear. "For today, James, that's enough."

And like Zane had pulled on puppet strings and loosed them, James sinks into himself, and pushes Zane off him with the last bit of his strength. They listen to James half run out of Hawthorne House. And they all flinch when the door bangs.

~

The driveway to the House was paved as little as possible, the stone laid so delicately it was like they crafted themselves from the ground. The rain soaked trees, autumn colours on the leaves, trying to hold the scents in place for as long as they could. Until the frost came.

Hawthorne House was old trees and aged stone, it was set right against the edge of Oakhurst Woods, the forest wrapping around the back of the imposing House, and when the mist passed through it clung to everything. And this she loved.

The Town was hundreds of years old.

There was a Bistro in the centre of the town, a library that was about the same size as the one at Hawthorne House, a flower shop with a flighty owner that was always about to close down, an apothecary that never had, a bed and breakfast in a House almost as old as Hawthorne, and an artesian store, Ink, Book & Candle, that sold all three things the name suggested in astounding quantities, and was her absolutely favourite place in the entire town, just after Hawthorne House.  
And Hawthorne House was one of the oldest in the town. The kind of old ones, built with stone on the outside to withstand centuries, where the kitchen had ornate fixings, old ovens, where the glass was stained in patterns, where the sides of the houses curved around the edges, creating alcoves, where the walls were hung with mirrors and paintings and carved through with niches. And the mailbox outside resembled an ornate birdcage and locked with a skeleton key.

"I'm going to lock up," Daniel says eventually. Its an hour later than he normally would walk, checking all the gates and doors, making sure everything was locked up for the night.

Elizabeth shoots him the ghost of a smile, folding her piano closed. Its part of the tradition. Daniel walks around and locks up, Elizabeth plays at the piano. It marks her night, and she knows it like she knows the sun sets.

"Walk with me, changeling?" Daniel asked, calling her by Elizabeth's nickname, and it makes her fold.

Its colder, with James still not back. But they walk around the House, anyway, through the path that winds from the driveway, to the backyard, past the stables, the cobblestoned pathway lighted on either side by lampposts, her fingers trailing along the ornate metal as they pass it, and they end at Jargon's enclosure, larger than the stables that housed five horses, the Jaguar was beyond competition Daniel's favourite. 

And James's.

"What happened to him?" Rebecca whispered, lightly touching the animal's fur as it came up to them.  
She'd asked this same question often, and Daniel always told her the same story, again and again, even now, almost a full decade later after she'd heard it, he told it to her again. She asked when she needed solace, when he did.

"He was hunted," Daniel answered, the animal encircling both of them, not as heart-stopping to her anymore as it had been the first time. "He survived, but just barely." He murmured into her mess of curls, pulling her against him.

"So he can't ever go back?" Rebecca asked.

Daniel shook his head, "He wouldn't be safe there."

They had become friends, over the years, her and the jaguar, Jargon. 

"Born in captivity he hadn't grown to fear humans properly," Daniel loosens his hold of her, and turns to the jaguar as he spoke. "He'd been raised to be hunted, but he'd been strong, and resilient, and survived the attempt." 

She knew the story so well she could recite it half asleep. But sometimes Daniel would bend to the animal, slowly, and it would come to him, and she would think the animal answered Daniel the way Elizabeth did, with all of him. 

They had become friends, Jargon and her, but she was nothing to this wild creature, compared to her brother.

James that was all wildfire, took to the Jaguar like he took to everything else. With reckless ease, with tempestuous abandon. And Jargon had taken to him just the same.

Daniel came, every night, as he walked around Hawthorne House, making sure everything was locked and closed properly, to the Jaguar he couldn't let go. He came tonight, because James still hadn't come back.

"He'll come back to you," Rebecca murmurs, and she isn't sure who she's telling, but Daniel moves closer to the animal, and it to him, and they're both looking for someone else.

~

But James comes back. 

He always would. If days later, if weeks, he always comes back, and he folds right into Daniel. The older man leaves the fire he'd been stoking, and wraps his arms around his youngest child.

"'m sorry," James murmurs into his father, the rest of them can barely hear him, they don't hear what else he says, but Daniel's face bleeds calmer.

"We're gonna work this through, you and me," Daniel promises him. James's aggression, Daniel's tight hold, unwilling to back down either of them. It would be a lot to work through, though.

Rebecca turns to Zane, and she knew if she could hear his thoughts, she would hear a mirror of hers. Because it would be so much more, than just James's aggression, than just Daniel's unwillingness to let go. But neither of them press into a war that isn't theirs.  
So Rebecca turns away from Daniel clinging to his son, and turns to her mother, instead. She sees Zane hold out watching them for a bit longer, willing to fight James's war for him, if he asked, then he turns with her.

"Tell me a story." Rebecca asks her mother. Elizabeth had thousands of stories, thousands more than her writer husband.

"How did you fall in love with Daniel?" 

"Oh, that's a boring story," Her mother waves her hand. "Let me tell you how I fell in love with you, little changeling."

Her mother had taken to call her that, after she told Rebecca about the daughter, Anastasia, she'd lost years ago, and Rebecca told her she had seen the white flowers glowing in the moonlight that she followed right into Hawthorne House. Rebecca once asked her if she ever thought she would rather have her own daughter, than one the fey dropped at her doorstep.

Elizabeth shook her head. She told her if she could, she would take them both, but if she had to choose, she'll keep what she was given.

Rebecca settles into her side with Zane on the floor, his back pressed against the sofa Elizabeth and her are sitting on. The rain is falling in steady sheets, the thunderstorm that cancelled classes for the past three days showing no signs of stopping. James and Daniel are stoking the fire. But Zane is pushing against James with his foot, the younger boy turning to pull faces at him every other minute through Daniel's instruction that may just be falling on deaf ears.

"There used to be an empty space on the mantelpiece." The mantelpiece that used to hold only James' photograph that changed with the years as he had, and an old still of Anastasia that never did.

"But you came, graceful and wild, and everything became whole. My heart, my soul," She pressed into Zane's shoulder, his head leaning on her thigh. "Stuttered when I saw you."

James had given up pretending to listen to Daniel's instructions or his mother's story, and taken to lying across Zane's outstretched legs. Rebecca caught Zane looking at her, and grinned at him. Elizabeth spoke without saying anything of their origins. 

Rebecca met them when she'd climbed in through James' bedroom window, about a decade ago, on one of the more severe nights in a winter as bad as theirs now. She'd seen the white flowers pale in the moonlight, crawling across wooden trellises that led from the ground right up to his bedroom window. James, startling out of his sleep, had been very accommodating. Pulling out his secret stash of biscuits, two flashlights, and some pillows and blankets under his bed, where they built a fort. They had both been all of seven years old. Elizabeth woke up to find what looked like either omelettes gone wrong, or two very colourful pancakes, and half her muffin tray finished between her son and a little girl wearing his clothes.

And her heart stuttered.

Zane was in London. James argued that it had been Rebecca's fault. Rebecca would swear that James was to blame. And Zane, never having been one to give credit where it wasn't due, said that while they both each made valiant attempts to make them deserving of all blame, it really had to be shared. They'd been thirteen then. Since James and Rebecca wasn't explicitly told not to leave the hotel room, and being very new at hotel rooms, hadn't thought they needed permission to leave.

So they left, and ended up at a bakery about five blocks down where they witnessed a fight breaking out, and promptly got involved. Someone threw a stone. The next thing either of them knew, they were running through boroughs, drenched through by the rain, till they collapsed on top of each other, against their hotel room door.

Elizabeth found her son and daughter a few hours later, laying on a double bed filled with food, and a boy wearing James' clothes laying between them, as though they'd known each other their whole lives.  
And her heart stuttered again.

"You really should stop sharing your clothes with strangers, James," Elizabeth admonished as she always did, when she told the story. "But, whose fault was it?" Elizabeth asked, mischief in her eyes.

"James," Rebecca answered on the tail end of her mother's sentence.

"Rebecca," James frowned at her.

Both turned to Zane. Rebecca looks down at him from her sofa, hanging over the edge, and James looks up at him from the floor, laying across his legs.

"Switzerland," He raised his hands in surrender. 

And this is them. Elizabeth's Irish Triplets.


	2. Gathering

“Come into my kitchen, James,” Elizabeth hissed, covered in flour from head to toe, turning to her youngest son, guarding her oven, “I dare you.”

Rebecca and Zane winced, James turned puppy blue eyes on his mother.

But Elizabeth was ruthless when it came to her baking. And James had a tendency to cause accidents. Mostly with fire.

“Zane and Rebecca are allowed to be in here,” He complained.

Rebecca had one leg curled underneath her, sitting on the island, Zane was sitting on the countertop right next to the pastry, the furthest counter away from the door, and she thought, by that alone, he was doing it purposefully, knowing James would never get that far into the kitchen.

Elizabeth stepped closer to her oven, unrelenting, “They haven’t set anything on fire this week,” She answered, picking up a mixing bowl and stirring vigorously.

“That was an accident!” James sputtered, then when three pairs of questioning eyes turned to him, he flushed.

Rebecca turned to Zane, Zane turned to her. They both shook their heads, neither of them had been the casualty, then.

“What,” Elizabeth said slowly, “Did you, do, James?”

“Dads calling me,” James says quickly, turning around.

Zane doesn’t quite catch his laugh, but stifles it when Elizabeth turns glaring eyes on him. Their mother would defend them with her life, but that life was so very much hers to take if she felt like it.

Zane doesn’t stay long after that, he’d only come to torment James, after all. And went looking for him after a few minutes. Rebecca stays on the island, though, till the sun had turned burnt orange in the sky, and the owl came to sit on the ledge of the kitchen window.

Rebecca turned to the snow white bird, “It’ll rain tonight,” Rebecca says conversationally. Elizabeth hums.

“Probably a storm,” Rebecca presses.

It had rained almost the whole day.

“It’ll be cold in the barn,” She carries on, trying to see her mother’s expression.

Elizabeth knelt to the oven, pulling out the pepper steak pie.

“And do you want to bring the horses into the house as well?” Elizabeth asked her daughter, settling the dish on the windowsill, she offers leftover pieces of meat to the owl, who sniffs, then turns away.

“Just Castings,” Rebecca says, watching the owl, “The horses will be warm.”

“If its warm enough for the horses, its warm enough for the owl,” Elizabeth says, but she’ll give in, she always did.

“But he’ll be lonely,” The bird lifts lightly off the windowsill, and into the kitchen.

Elizabeth turns to her daughter, the owl settling down at her side.

“One night,” Elizabeth warns, “James, I swear,” She doesn’t turn around.

James stops dead in his tracks at the door. “Its out of the oven!”

“Its dinner,” Elizabeth answered, still not turning to him, “Not whatever you call this meal of yours between tea and dinner.”

“Please, mom, I’m starving,” James implores, walking further into the kitchen. Elizabeth is less territorial now that her pie is through the danger.

James comes closer to the oven, and Rebecca, her fingers threading through soft feathers, lift her head to her brother, and chaos unfolds slowly.

And somehow, she knows there will be a fire.  
~  
Rebecca’s almost asleep, when her bedroom door opens, and James follows the soft passage light in.

“You asleep?” He mumbles, like he had been a minute ago.

She was about to, but, sitting up, she shakes it off quickly. They have a treaty ten years standing.

“This house’s too big,” He mumbles, climbing into her bed, “I had to walk so far to get here.”

His room wasn’t so far from hers, she was on the west side, away from the street, further to the back of the house, so near to their stables she could hear the horses at night from her window, if she left it open. Zane was on the almost other side of the house, he could see the street lights from his window, even if he couldn’t hear the sound of passing cars, not that anything passed by them, this far out of the city, so close into Oakhurst Woods. James couldn’t hear the horses, or see the lights, caught between the two of them, his room was almost right at the landing, where the sweeping staircase stopped at the first floor.

And she thinks he’s always like that, caught between the two of them.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” He mumbles into her pillow, settling down so close to her she could hear his breathing, blonde hair fanning around him on her pillow. His hair and hers were so polar opposite in colour, it was shocking how alike it was in nature. Both uncontrollable. His stood straight in different directions, hers in wild curls.

“You’re scared,” She answers him, like he would have answered her, if she’d been confused and he hadn’t. “Dad is too. You’re both of you, scared, and you don’t know what to do,”

“He thinks,” James mutters, then reconsiders, “I’m sorry,” He tells her, wrapping an arm around her half-heartedly, his words slurring.

“Don’t get comfortable,” She warns him. “You sleep in here and Zane will have my head in the morning.”

“You just want the bed to yourself,” He calls her almost immediately. “You’re selfish.”

“Very much so,” She acknowledges without argument. 

“We could all three fit on here,” James mumbles again, “Still have so much space.”

“No,” She insisted, shoving James in the shoulder, if he fell asleep here she would fare need a dragon’s roar to wake him, and she would never manage to carry him by herself.

“James,” She threatened, leaning over him, “If you’re sleeping, you’re done talking.”

“Selfish,” James muttered, but pushed himself up anyway, leaning against her headboard. He rolled his shoulders back, stretching his white, threadbare shirt.

“You need a new shirt,” Rebecca frowned. “You have new shirts, Mom put new ones in your closet Sunday.”

Elizabeth had their clothing choices down to a science.

“This one’s comfortable,” He shrugs, pulling his legs up to his chest. He looks, not smaller, but, unsure.

“James?” Rebecca asks.

“Don’t you ever want to leave?” He murmurs, and his eyes widen a little bit, and he asks like he’s asked something irreverent. “Just, leave, you know. Away from, all of this?”

All of this. 

The mother that had taken her in when she had nowhere else to go. The father that had taught her to hunt, then to argue law. The grandfather that gave her a car for James’s birthday but only if it was vintage and had a stick shift. The aunt that decided she must have the same birthday as her own daughter. A cousin that dragged her with to every ballet class, painting lesson and through the outcrop of trees that could lead them further to Oakhurst Woods. 

These strangers that made her theirs.

She bites her bottom lip, because she understands what he wants. Hawthorne House was built on lands spanning over a hundred acres, the House itself a fifty thousand square feet, and she knew he felt all of that in how much he had to prove he belonged in it, but she so wholly knows, she will never want what he does. She doesn’t want to tell him that, but he turns from her. As if he’d heard her anyway.

“James,” She stills him, a hand on his arm to stop him from leaving. “That’s not fair, if you left, Zane would follow you, you would have Zane with you always, you would have all of you with you, you would be whole. If I left,” She shakes her head, “I would be leaving broken.”

James is quiet, and she thinks he’s drawing parallels. A decade ago she’d climbed into his bedroom broken, and became whole. He, she thought, had come to hers, broken, trying to become whole, too, and she couldn’t answer him. But her whole world had been to be a part of his. His whole, would be leaving.

“Dad told me to take another year,” James says finally, “To decide, be sure what I want. I am sure,” He stresses, “I was sure last year. It’s December, there’s still so much left of this year, he’s being,” James stops himself. “He’s not being impossible,” He sighs.

“He’s being our dad,” She tells him. “He’s scared he’s going to lose you.”

“He won’t,” James murmurs, like he knows how useless it is to keep repeating it, like he’d been for six month already. “How could he ever lose me?”

He’s staring at the mirror on the other wall, facing it almost directly, looking at himself and seeing his father. Rebecca looks at the mirror, too, but she can’t see what he does. She looks at herself, and if she sees any likeness between her and her mother, she’s elated, her heart beats faster, hoping every wish of hers is true. James looks at himself and sees a burden, she sees a prayer half answered.

James turns from the mirror, settles down, and pulls her duvet over himself. “I’m sleeping here,” He murmurs into her pillows, and she starts to object. “Or I won’t sleep tonight, and it’ll be your fault, and then tomorrow will be hell for all of us.”

Rebecca stares down at her brother. Zane would never not follow James, James would never leave him. And it wasn’t that he wouldn’t, he couldn’t. It would be like cutting himself in half and leaving it behind, it was impossible.

But leaving her. It wasn’t impossible. For all that they followed one train of thought, James could leave her here. He just didn’t want to. And she didn’t want to let him go alone, but she could.

And she wondered, which of them would give first.

Rebecca frowns at the blackmail. “Go and sleep with Zane,” She’s almost sure that’s where he came from.

“Other side of the house, too far,” He mumbles, that was where he’d come from. “And,” Its not the distance that keeps him from going back. “I can’t, talk to him. And, I don’t,” Want him to see me. She fills in the blanks for him. James never wants Zane to see him broken, and it isn’t his pity he’s afraid of, its Zane’s bravery he struggles to match.

So she settles down next to him. And she would throw him out, his fear and his weakness, but they have a treaty ten years standing.

 

Chapter 2  
Storm

She forgot her key. She almost can’t believe herself. She’d checked her pockets, picked up her phone by the door, slipped it into her inside jacket pocket, but she took James’s car, and James’s car keys didn’t have house keys on them, because James felt, rather passionately, that car keys should only have the car keys on them.

Zane, like a normal, sane person, kept house keys on his. Rebecca, like a normal, sane person, kept house keys on hers. Rebecca, like an idiot, took her brother’s keys, who, unlike a normal, sane person, didn’t keep house keys on his.

She huffed, blew her curly hair out of her eyes, and turned to the white trellises around the back that a little girl’s memory told her would lead to James’s bedroom window.

The back door would be open.

This would be more fun.

She pulled herself up on the wooden planks, groaning a little at her seventeen year old weight, not bearing it as easily as her nine year old one, but it held her all the same.

She pulled herself onto the windowsill, and through the white paned glass.

James screamed.

“Is that not why you leave the window open?” Rebecca asked that night, exhausted, for the hundredth time about James’s complaining.

James answered in a sentence with more censored words than actual words.

Zane winced.

“James,” Elizabeth warned, sitting by the stereo.

“No,” James growled, amending his sentence. “That’s not why I leave the window open.”

Zane and James are stretched out on one couch, facing each other, wearing the same pair of black pyjamas, the same kind of messed hair, and if she had to hazard a guess, working on the same thing on their synced MacBooks.

She’s on the floor with her back to the same couch, and they’re all wearing the same pair of glasses. They normally got things in threes, since they’d been fifteen, since they’d found Zane. Before that things were in twos, since they’d found her.

And before that James doesn’t let anyone speak about. She thinks it’s because they almost weren’t allowed to keep her. But Daniel was a wicked lawyer, and his sister Emma was worse.

Elizabeth had just said she was keeping her.

October first had come with wild storms, and kept them inside for most of their days. Normally Zane and James would be at the open air theatre, where they worked the night shifts, setting up, some, watching the older movies that played across the sheets that was anything but high definition. Rebecca would be home, or down in the city square, or with her brothers.

Elizabeth fumbled with the music, till she found a beat that was infectious, and a voice that was captivating.

James jumped to his feet, and pulled her off the floor.

“Come on,” He called, spinning around her, trying to get her to dance. Elizabeth turned the stereo louder, till she could hear nothing but the voice of a man she’d danced to a thousand times over.

“This is your favourite!” James screamed above the song, and eventually she gave in, and reached behind her for Zane.

Zane lifted an arm to her, and all of himself to James, and they pulled him into their wild dance, too.


End file.
